Real Quick: On Jazz

It is a strange brand of man who can appreciate the innuendos of a trumpet, muted or not - the intricacies of a well-driven bassline, soft and subtle but always present; the nuanced touch of hammers on strings created by deft hands. But the synthesis of these diversified sounds appeals, sticky sweet and musky, to the rookie and the connoisseur.

This is America's music - the precursor to soul and funk-rock, the grandfather of hip-hop, pinned up high and tight in a suit like you knew he would be but never far from his whiskey glass. This is the beat of a movement that has always existed in America and always will, the steady pulsing of a silent oppresion and the creativity it spawns. Make no doubt about it, this is Black music - but it belongs to all of us.

Miles and Yardbird, The Duke and his damsels, a Monk and a piano, Fats Waller, and the rent. Together they tell the story of generation arriving before its time, a single perfect rosebud emerging before the last frost. Destined, in a sense, to stall and die. But the jazz movement was better than that - is better than that. It makes no demands on the music, imposes no social constraints. Listen to it. It's for itself, the pure expression of an emotion no words can match. Listen. Brushing symbols and snare drums, a bass walking with swagger in its step. And then the sax, piercing and clear, just barely this side of cutting, whining and droning at the edge of the register and then coming back down to earth, setting nicely next to the drummer and setting the trumpet free. It does work.

The thing about evolution is that it doesn't necessitate the death of the formerly evolved. Jazz morphed from ragtime and be-bop and morphed into soul, and R&B, and funk-rock, and hip-hop, but it never died. It speaks still from the immortal, the heartbeat of a people and a nation, an almost forgotten but never mistaken confluence of hope and despair, solace and solidarity.